The ‘great beehive of Christendom’, London in the early seventeenth century was the largest city in England, home to more than 200,000 souls. Its population growth, more rapid than that of the rest of the country, was not halted even by severe plague outbreaks like that of 1603, which claimed the lives of around a fifth of its inhabitants. As the population rose, so the demand for additional housing increased, and by the early seventeenth century London was no longer defined by the area within its medieval walls, though it was administratively separate from nearby Westminster, to which it was physically joined. Many contemporaries lamented the capital’s expansion, among them James I, who commented that ‘soon, London will be all England’.
London’s rapid growth was driven by its economic prosperity. The City had long been the financial centre of the kingdom, and its banking facilities were used by successive monarchs, though the early Stuarts kings found it harder to extract loans from the City than many of their predecessors.
By the early seventeenth century, London had pretensions to being regarded as the first city in Europe. Not long after James’s accession Dekker described the capital as ‘Europe’s jewel’, and in 1628 he characterized it as a new Troy or new Rome.
London’s government was in the hands of the City Corporation, which comprised the Courts of Aldermen and Common Council. Its executive functions were discharged by the aldermanic court, whose chairman was the lord mayor. The aldermen, of whom there were 26 (one for each ward) were appointed for life, and took turns to serve as mayor. Legislative functions were in the hands of Common Council, whose membership numbered 196 at the start of the century. This body has been likened to the contemporary House of Commons, as it enjoyed the power of taxation and its members were elected by the freemen of each of ward, the municipal equivalent of a parliamentary constituency. However, the comparison is not exact. Unlike Members of the Commons, councilmen were required to submit themselves for re-election each year. Moreover, whereas the Commons determined to a considerable degree its own business, Common Council was more strictly circumscribed, as the aldermen could veto its bills while the lord mayor controlled its sittings.
I. Representation and Elections
London was the only borough apart from the combined borough of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, to send four representatives to Westminster. Nevertheless, considering its immense population, the capital was severely under-represented. To some extent this problem was more apparent than real, for in most parliaments there were several leading Londoners who, unable to secure seats in the capital, found places elsewhere. In the first Jacobean Parliament London’s honorary Members included the alderman and Vintner Sir John Swinarton, who sat for East Grinstead. A member of London’s committee for parliamentary legislation, Swinarton was instructed by the Corporation in February 1606 to help lobby the House regarding one of its bills.
The two senior London Members were considered knights of the shire, a distinction not accorded to the parliamentary representatives of other county boroughs. In May 1628 the Commons queried whether the City’s senior Members were entitled to be regarded as knights, and ordered London’s writ to be examined,
All four Members received wages. In 1584 the junior Members had each been paid the statutory rate of 2s. per day, and their senior colleagues received twice that amount. Every Member also received a clothing allowance of £6 13s. 4d. to purchase a scarlet gown
London’s parliamentary elections during this period are poorly documented, for while the Common Council minute books for the years 1604-28 survive intact, they record only the election of 1604.
Although ordinary freemen were permitted to vote, the right of nomination was more narrowly controlled. The aldermen alone selected the candidates for the two senior seats. For the prime place they chose from their own number someone who had recently held the mayoralty and was of knightly status. Often the man picked was a Merchant Adventurer, and he usually belonged to one of the Great Twelve livery companies.
A third characteristic which distinguished many of the men elected to the junior seats was their association with the City government. Fuller was a Corporation lawyer; Gore was a deputy alderman and a former City auditor; and Bond was a serving auditor, as was Abbot, who may also have been a deputy alderman. Robert Myddelton’s electoral prospects were undoubtedly improved by the fact that, at the time of his election, his brother, Sir Thomas Myddelton I, was lord mayor.
London elections rarely gave rise to controversy, let alone contests, but in 1614 there may have been a tussle for one of the junior seats, as one observer reported that the Skinner William Towerson had been returned, whereas the successful candidate was actually Robert Myddelton. Confusion also surrounded the election to the second of the two senior seats, which was customarily bestowed upon the recorder. It appears that the City initially declined to choose its recorder, Sir Henry Montagu, because it was feared that the king had selected Sir Thomas Lowe, the City’s choice for the first seat, as Speaker of the forthcoming Parliament. Under normal circumstances Lowe’s selection as Speaker would not have posed any difficulty; after all, a London Member had served as Speaker in 1601. However, in this instance the matter was complicated by the fact that Montagu had recently been promoted to king’s serjeant. London’s ordinary voters, and perhaps also many in Common Council, realized that, were they to return both men, the king rather than the City would have first claim on the loyalty and service of both its senior Members. Consequently, at the election on 1 Mar. the City endorsed the return of Lowe, but would ‘in no wise … admit master recorder, alleging only that he is the king’s serjeant’. As no alternative candidate was offered, the seat remained vacant for several days.
Technically speaking London managed to avoid a contest in 1628, when hostility to the Forced Loan spilled over into the parliamentary election. London was incensed at the demand for a Loan, as it had not yet been repaid the money it had lent the king in 1617 and 1625 and was in the middle of raising money to pay for a fleet of 20 ships for the Navy. In April 1627 individual members of the Privy Council went to the Guildhall to persuade the citizenry to contribute, but though the City’s officers said they would oblige it was ‘generally refused by the commons’
City anger over the Forced Loan may have also played a part in the election of Thomas Moulson for the first seat. Moulson is unlikely to have been the aldermen’s preferred choice, for though an alderman, Grocer and governor of the Merchant Adventurers, he had never served as mayor nor had he been knighted. City-wide anger certainly lay behind the election of the Loan refusers James Bunce and Henry Waller to the junior seats. Both were common councilmen, but Waller had never been an officer of his Company and Bunce, though a prominent Leatherseller, was not a member of one of the Great Twelve. The electoral upset of 1628, in particular the rejection of the recorder, was deeply humiliating to the Court of Aldermen and caused ‘great heart-burning in the City’. Indeed, one Jesuit observer noted with relish that London was ‘as much distempered as ever Florence was’.
II. Purveyance and Parliament
Criticism of the abuses associated with purveyance was acute in later Elizabethan parliaments, and following James’s accession this resentment increased. Whereas Elizabeth had remained unmarried, James had a wife and children, thereby multiplying the number of servants requiring to be fed. London, being the seat of royal government, suffered particularly badly from the purveyors, who frequently exceeded their commissions, and grievances quickly surfaced. In July 1603 the City instructed its common pleader, Nicholas Fuller, to seek a legal remedy for the Poulterers, who complained that their stock had been impounded by the purveyors.
The 1604 session ended without resolving the problem. When Parliament reassembled in November 1605, London’s attitude towards the demands of the board of Green Cloth had begun to harden. Until then the Corporation had sought merely to reform purveyance, but on 6 Nov. the London-based Spanish Company declared that the capital’s ancient charters freed the City ‘from all such purveyance, exactions and charges’.
Why had the Spanish Company suggested a radical solution to the problem of purveyance? Pauline Croft argues that one reason must lie in the strained relations between those of its members who traded with the Levant and the board of Green Cloth. In 1597 the Levant merchants had entered into a composition agreement with the Green Cloth, but they objected to the size of the sums demanded and fell into arrears. In June 1604 the king’s Grocer summoned them to complain, and by November 1605 continued non-payment had led the purveyors to seize several cargoes of imported currants, including those belonging to the influential Levant merchant, John Bate, whom the Spanish Company named to the small committee set up on 6 Nov. to resist the demands of the royal Household.
London now appeared determined to fight for complete immunity based on its charter. Many in the capital may have believed that the chances of success were high, as two years earlier the City had successfully stood on its charter rights to help strike down in Queen’s Bench the patent for the import, manufacture and distribution of playing cards.
The Corporation’s essentially moderate position is also discernable in the Commons’ debates of 1606. These revolved mainly around the bill preferred by John Hare which, in effect, aimed to abolish purveyance on the grounds that it was illegal. While the king would retain the right of pre-emption he would no longer be able to pay less than the market price for goods taken up, nor would he be compensated for the additional cost to the Exchequer. However, Recorder Montagu, who seems to have acted as London’s chief spokesman in the Commons on this issue, threw his weight behind the more moderate measure preferred by Sir Robert Johnson, which advocated composition.
Following the end of the second session, purveyance largely vanished from the Commons’ agenda. When one of the Members for Gatton, Sir Nicholas Saunders, proposed that a fresh bill against purveyors and cart-takers be drafted he found no support, not even among the London Members despite the fact that abuses by purveyors continued to antagonize the City’s government.
III. Free Trade and Parliament
As the greatest port in England, London handled a large share of the country’s overseas trade. Much of this commerce was in the hands of a small number of chartered trading companies, of which the most important at the beginning of James’s reign was the Merchant Adventurers, who dominated cloth exports to the Continent. Trade with the Indies was controlled by the newly formed East India Company, while the route to Russia was monopolized by the Muscovy Company. Of the major London trading companies, only the Eastland Company, which traded with the Baltic, did not enjoy a monopoly. London-based trading companies were in theory national ventures, open to anyone who had the money to invest in their stock, but in practice they were dominated by a small number of wealthy London merchants, who jealously guarded their monopoly rights at the expense of the outports. Their extensive trading privileges were a source of envy outside the capital, particularly during the final years of Elizabeth’s reign, when there was general hostility to all forms of monopoly.
London’s dominant position came under attack at the beginning of James’s reign. On 18 Apr. 1604 a bill to grant free trade to all merchants was given a first reading in the Commons. The Venetian ambassador believed that this bill, which threatened to dissolve the London trading companies, was drawn up in response to a petition ‘signed by many merchants’
The failure of the free trade bill did not deter the opponents of London’s trading companies from mounting fresh attacks. When Parliament reassembled in November 1605, the attentions of the free-traders focused on the Spanish Company, which had been recently revived after a long period of inactivity caused by the Elizabethan war with Spain. The Company was aware of its vulnerability, and in order to avoid parliamentary opposition it had obtained a fresh charter in June 1605 that widened its membership. As a result, almost half the governing assistants were drawn from the outports.
The overthrow of the Spanish Company was not quite the final act in the free trade dramas of 1604-6, as it put fresh heart into the opponents of the London trading companies. On 17 Mar. 1606, five days after the bill condemning the Spanish Company was sent up to the Lords, a measure to throw open the Muscovy trade received a second reading and was committed
The free trade debates of 1604-6 underlined sharp differences between London’s economic interests and those of the rest of the country, particularly the outports. However, opposition to the London trading companies was not confined to lobby groups outside the capital. In his report on free trade in May 1604, Sir Edwin Sandys observed that London was not a single economic entity but a city of competing commercial interests. All the merchants who had come before the committee had
complained grievously of the engrossing and restraint of trade by the rich merchants of London, as being to the undoing or great hindrance of all the rest; and of London merchants, three parts joined in the same complaint against a fourth part; and of that fourth part, some standing stiffly for their own Company, yet repined at other companies.
CJ, i. 218a.
The truth of Sandys’s observation is borne out by the hostility expressed by the Clothworkers towards the Merchant Adventurers in 1604 and 1606. Longstanding enemies of the Merchant Adventurers, the Clothworkers existed to dress cloth whereas the Merchant Adventurers wanted to export cloth in an unfinished condition. In 1566 a bill protecting the Clothworkers’ interests was enacted but was widely disregarded, not least by the Crown, which had recently granted several licences allowing unfinished cloth to be exported. Consequently, soon after Parliament met in March 1604, the Clothworkers agreed to finance a bill drawn up by their yeomanry concerned with ‘work’. Ten days later, on 31 Mar., a bill ‘against transporting of woollen cloths and for setting on work the poor commons of this realm’ was given a first reading. However, the Merchant Adventurers, not yet under fire by the free trade lobby, were prepared. When the bill was given a second reading on 4 Apr. another measure, to permit the export of unfinished cloths, was also read. The Clothworkers failed to make headway, and not until the Spanish Company was mired in difficulties, in early 1606, was the climate right to try again. In February 1606 a bill to prevent the export of undressed cloth received two readings in the Commons. The following month a bill forbidding the export of undressed coloured cloths received a second reading and was opposed by the Merchant Adventurer Richard Gore ‘as against the common conditions of peace with our neighbours’. Sent up to the Lords in April, it was rejected as unfit, although the Clothworkers had tried to enlist the aid of the earl of Salisbury (Robert Cecil†).
The Clothworkers were not the only livery company to throw in their lot with the free trade lobby in 1604 and 1606. The artisan skinners, reluctant members of the Skinners’ Company, were restricted to dressing furs as they were barred from the export trade by the Eastland Company’s charter. This limited trade was jeopardized altogether by the Eastland merchants, who by 1604 had begun buying up undressed skins from petty chapmen.
The acts to relieve the artisan skinners and dissolve the Spanish Company dealt a significant blow to the London joint stock companies. Although the assault was not renewed in the 1606-7 session widespread resentment at London’s privileges remained, and resurfaced as a result of the Southampton charter bill. Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, a London merchant named John Davies had set up shop in Southampton, even though Southampton’s charter of 1445 prohibited merchants not free of the town from buying or selling merchandize within its precincts upon pain of forfeiture of the goods. After the mayor seized Davies’ goods as ‘foreign bought and sold’, Davies bought back his property for £40, but subsequently sued in King’s Bench for the return of this money, arguing that London’s charters entitled him, as a London merchant, to buy and sell freely anywhere in England.
When Parliament reassembled in 1610, London’s privileges were largely forgotten amid concern for impositions and the Great Contract. By 1614, however, there was renewed interest in London’s trading companies. A quarrel between the Muscovy Company and Hull over whaling off Greenland saw the establishment of a Commons’ committee of inquiry, and when the House learned of plans to replace the Merchant Adventurers with a rival consortium of London merchants led by Alderman Cockayne it responded by summoning representatives of both groups.
Like the ill-fated Spanish Company, the French Company was not entirely composed of London merchants but it was clearly dominated by them. Many Members of the Commons, particularly those from Devon and Bristol, saw the establishment of the Company as yet another sign that greedy London merchants were trying to monopolize trade at the expense of the rest of the country, and they reacted accordingly. The Plymouth Member, Sir William Strode, complained that ‘the Londoners’ had obtained the patent in an underhand fashion, and tried to whip up support for a new free trade bill.
The 1614 Parliament was dissolved before the matter could be resolved to the Commons’ satisfaction. By the time Parliament reassembled in 1621, attitudes towards the London trading companies had hardened owing to the trade depression and the general unpopularity of monopolies. Indeed, so numerous were the complaints that one historian has rightly observed that ‘the Parliament of 1621 represents the high point of the hostility of the Commons to the national chartered companies’.
The wave of hostility against London’s merchants emanated mainly from the outports, but there were also elements within the City which sought to capitalize on the discomfiture of the trading companies. As well as the Vintners, the Grocers’ Company exploited the situation to its advantage. After refusing to pay the Levant Company for currants they had received, complaining of high prices, they appealed to the Commons for redress. They did so at the suggestion of the Venetian ambassador, who explained to his political masters that this was ‘the best way to unsettle the [Levant] merchants, since they know that there are many in the assembly [i.e. the Commons] who intend to destroy all the companies, the roots of a thousand disorders, and to make free trade’.
When Parliament reassembled in 1624 the Commons’ antipathy towards the London trading companies had begun to soften. There was now some sympathy for their grievances where these coincided with the interests of the commonweal. Indeed, the House endorsed the complaint of the Levant Company, which petitioned to have an increase of 2s. 2d. in the impost upon currants removed, although it refused to condemn an even higher rise in the levy on raw silk, regarding this as ‘but an increase in subsidy’. It also supported the Merchant Adventurers when they complained of the pretermitted customs, undue levies by the Customs house, and exactions by the Dutch and the archduchess.
The parliaments of 1625-9 saw an end to the Commons’ criticism of the London trading companies. The single exception was that of 1628, when the Greenland Company, an offshoot of the Muscovy Company, was condemned for aggressively monopolizing the North American whaling trade.
The failure of London’s merchants to obtain redress in 1628 caused some of them to take radical action. In September 1628 14 Levant Company merchants broke into the Customs house to take back their currants, among them the governor of the East India Company and former London Member, Sir Maurice Abbot. By the beginning of 1629 some radical merchants, among them the Levant Company merchant-MP John Rolle, were refusing to pay any customs duties not specifically sanctioned by Parliament, including Tunnage and Poundage, thereby linking their cause with that of the Commons, which had explicitly condemned the king’s continued levy of this duty in June 1628. When Parliament reassembled in January 1629, the Commons took up their cause, though without success. Following the dissolution, however, both the Levant Company and the Merchant Adventurers cited the Commons’ Protestation of March 1629 as the reason for their continued refusal to pay.
The period between the accession of Charles I and the dissolution of 1629 clearly witnessed a major political realignment. Whereas before 1625 the London trading companies and the Commons had seemed natural enemies, by 1629 they were natural allies. As relations between the two sides thawed the trading companies turned to the Commons for support, and not just in matters connected with unparliamentary customs duties. In 1626, for example, the Levant Company appealed to the Commons for help in its fight to retain Sir Thomas Roe as ambassador to Constantinople.
There we vent our cloths and wool, and from thence we bring tar, pitch, etc.by which the kingdom is provided with the Navy, and if the emperor take it [the Baltic] he will master us all, and that he will easily do if we take not part in defence of it.
CD 1628, ii. 300, 305.
The East India Company also took advantage of the improved relations between the trading companies and the Commons by drafting a petition to the Lower House pointing out the benefits to the kingdom of the East India trade and asking for a public declaration of encouragement. In 1626 the Company had evidently been widely criticized for failing to stand up to Buckingham, who had extorted £22,000 from them. Responsibility for the petition was handed to its deputy governor, Clitherow. Soon after he appealed to the Commons on behalf of the Eastland Company, Clitherow privately approached the chairman of the committee for trade, Sir Dudley Digges, to learn whether the petition would be well received. Digges, himself a member of the East India Company, assured him that it would, for ‘though two years ago there was a little imputation on the Company by the gentry of the kingdom, they were now better affected towards them’. However, despite repeated attempts, Clitherow failed to get the petition read, probably because other issues were more pressing.
IV. Corporation Legislation
As the largest city in England, London had a tremendous appetite for legislation. Indeed, during Elizabeth’s reign, as David Dean has remarked, ‘more bills pertained to London than to any other locality’.
The business of determining the City’s legislative agenda was usually entrusted to a committee appointed by the Court of Aldermen. Consisting mainly of aldermen and common councilmen, it was normally established shortly before Parliament met. However, in 1614 this committee was not appointed until the first day of the session, and for the first Jacobean Parliament it was not appointed until October 1605.
Although the City’s parliamentary committee largely determined the legislative agenda, the Court of Aldermen continued to take a close interest in parliamentary business. The committee kept the aldermanic council informed of its proceedings, and from time to time the aldermen intervened directly to order particular bills to be drafted or followed. In April 1606, for example, the aldermen instructed that bills for weighing seacoal and prohibiting the sale of ‘unsized’ loaves within the City be preferred.
Corporation bills were usually drafted by the City solicitor, who attended the City’s parliamentary committee and took advice from the recorder and the City’s other law officers.
The precise volume of legislation pursued by the Corporation is difficult to establish. Decisions regarding the legislative programme were mainly taken in committee, whose proceedings went unrecorded, while the accounts of the City chamberlain, which doubtless indicated the exact number of bills preferred each session, no longer exist for this period. Nevertheless, the City’s legislative programme can partially be reconstructed from the minutes of the Court of Aldermen, which often mention bills, and from the parliamentary records themselves.
In 1604 the Corporation, despite neglecting to appoint a committee to determine its parliamentary business, may have preferred or sponsored as many as eight bills. Four were certainly drawn up or paid for by the City: the bill to relieve debtors and recover small debts in London (which concerned the City’s Court of Requests, also known as the Court of Conscience);
The City’s legislative programme for the 1605-6 session was just as extensive as it had been in 1604. As well as the New River bill and measures concerning seacoal and ‘unsized’ loaves, London’s governors preferred a bill regarding the manufacture, finishing and searching of cloth, which was drafted in consultation with the appropriate livery companies.
During the third session, the City’s legislative programme was only slightly less ambitious. Shortly before Parliament reassembled, William Dyos was told to prefer a bill ‘concerning new buildings and divided houses in and about London, and to follow the same in such manner as it may best take effect’, previous attempts to secure legislation having failed.
The records relating to the fourth session in 1610 are more helpful than those for the period 1604-7. On 14 June 1610 the Court of Aldermen recorded that six bills had been drawn up on their behalf.
The City submitted no legislation to the fifth session, although it did give Hugh Myddelton leave to petition the Commons to inspect the New River works.
The cheesemongers’ bill made little progress before the Parliament was dissolved. It was resubmitted with Corporation sponsorship in 1621, when the Corporation promoted little legislation of its own. In April the Court of Aldermen ordered another bill to be drafted concerning new buildings and the subdivision of existing properties. London’s governors may also have been behind bills for relief of the poor in and around London and for the recovery of small debts in the capital.
In 1625 the Corporation did not tender a single bill to Parliament. The severe outbreak of plague may have been largely responsible, but the previous two assemblies showed that its enthusiasm for legislation was waning. In 1626 the Corporation made clear to the City Members and its committee for parliamentary affairs that its main concern in Parliament was with ‘the monies disbursed by the City about levying of the soldiers’ for the war against Spain.
The striking collapse in the Corporation’s appetite for legislation was mirrored by a similar decline in the legislative interests of London’s companies.
An important factor in the Corporation’s abandonment of its customary legislative programme was undoubtedly the money wasted on the fruitless pursuit of bills. The financial losses incurred in 1614 and 1621 are unknown, but spending on bills in previous sessions was certainly heavy. In 1604 around £100 was spent, and in addition, as tradition demanded, a gratuity of £10 was given to the Speaker at the beginning of the session.
The Corporation’s abandonment of parliamentary legislation meant that it was compelled to explore other avenues to solve its problems. Royal Proclamations had long been regarded as an alternative to legislation, even before the 1620s, especially in relation to the problems posed by overcrowding and new buildings. After the parliamentary sessions of 1604-7, which witnessed the loss of five bills on these subjects, the king stepped in and issued two Proclamations. Another, designed to close various loopholes, was issued in July 1620. Proclamations lacked the authority of statute law, however, and consequently in 1614 and 1621 the Corporation again tried to persuade the Commons to pass legislation. Far from lending a sympathetic ear, in 1621 and 1624 the House took up the complaint of the Carpenters’ Company which, along with various builders, protested at the Crown’s establishment of commissions restricting building activity in and around the capital. In May 1624 the Commons found for the Carpenters, and included their complaint in the grievances presented to the king. However, James was fully behind the City’s governors, and expressed surprise that the Commons had made ‘a matter of building about London a grievance’.
Despite abandoning its customary legislative agenda in the 1620s, the Corporation continued to take an interest in others’ bills, particularly those it deemed harmful to the City’s interests. After the artisan Clothworkers submitted a bill to the 1624 Parliament seeking to prohibit freemen belonging to other London livery companies from employing apprentices to row, shear and dress cloth, the aldermen instructed the City’s Members ‘to use their endeavour and best intents to suppress the said Act [sic]’. The aldermen also intervened on behalf of the Butchers’ Company, which complained that a bill to prevent butchers from grazing their cattle disadvantaged its members. Indeed, they instructed London’s representatives to ‘use their best endeavours for stay of the same Act [sic], which is conceived by this court to be hurtful unto this City’.
V. London’s Companies and Hospitals
The Corporation of London was the major interest group in the City, but it was not the only one. Most of the capital’s livery or trading companies approached Parliament at one time or another, either to extend their authority or defend their interests. The almost complete absence of any reference to Parliament in the highly detailed accounts of the Turners’ Company is striking precisely because it is so untypical.
Unlike the Corporation, London’s companies were not automatically entitled to instruct the City’s parliamentary representatives. However, as we have seen, the Court of Aldermen sometimes required London’s Members to further a particular Company’s parliamentary interests. Moreover, the companies often employed London’s lawyer-Members when they had business in Parliament. In 1604, for example, Nicholas Fuller seems to have been active on behalf of five livery companies, as well as Bridewell Hospital, whose bill he may have helped to draft. Fuller’s fellow London lawyer and Member, Sir Henry Montagu, provided the Vintners with legal advice on an alehouse bill, and in 1614 both he and Fuller advised the Bakers over their legislation. The companies also approached those London Members with no legal expertise. In 1621 the Plaisterers evidently lobbied Sir Thomas Lowe to oppose the Bricklayers’ bill, as they bestowed 3s. 8d. upon his servant.
Many livery companies looked beyond London’s own parliamentary representatives for assistance in the Commons, particularly to those barrister-Members who counted them among their clients. In 1604 the Vintners turned to the Berkshire lawyer Francis Moore, who had been giving the Company legal advice since about 1599.
Although many London companies enjoyed an enviable range of contacts in the Commons, they did not neglect to lobby the vast mass of Members with whom they were unconnected. In 1610 the Grocers paid their clerk 10s. for making copies of a summary of the Apothecaries’ bill, which they opposed, ‘and other instructions for the knights of Parliament to speak to [sic] the bill for this Company’.
While print made for more effective distribution of information, there was no substitute for lobbying in person. In 1604 a delegation from the Cordwainers visited Sir John Savile, the chairman of the committee for the tanners’ bill, to put their case.
Under Elizabeth, London companies sometimes dined or bought drinks for Members of the Commons whose views they wished to influence. In 1566, for instance, the Clothworkers spent £4 10s. on ‘fish sent to Sir Ambrose Cave’s [sitting for Warwickshire] for dinners at two several times when the committees of our bill met there’.
Unlike the Corporation, London’s companies were not entitled to use the City solicitor to prosecute their business unless they hired his services. In 1614 the Bakers paid him 20s. ‘for his pains’ in preferring their bill, and in 1621 the Plaisterers gave him 11s. for helping them to oppose the Bricklayers.
Legislation was expensive, and for most companies it represented a major drain on their resources. In the financial year 1586/7 half the Curriers’ spending went on a single piece of legislation.
Most livery company legislation was drawn up on the orders of the Company officers, but ordinary members might also offer up their own bills for approval. In May 1604 the Fishmongers were asked by one of their members, Thomas Fuller, to help pay for a bill to enforce the observation of fish days, which he and another man had already introduced to the Commons. The Company agreed, and though the bill failed to proceed beyond a second reading Fuller was repaid all the money he had laid out, amounting to £11 13s. 4d.
In theory, the livery companies were expected to obtain the approval of the Court of Aldermen before preferring legislation to Parliament. In practice, however, this requirement was widely disregarded: between 1571 and 1601 only the Bakers, in 1589, are known to have sought permission to submit a bill.
Livery companies generally preferred bills to Parliament on their own, but where the interests of more than one Company coincided it made sense for those concerned to pool their resources. In 1606 the Great Twelve jointly preferred a bill to clarify an Act of 1504 regarding the execution of Company ordinances. Each Company paid a share of the cost, and the responsibility for following the bill settled upon William Dyos, the clerk to the Goldsmiths’ Company and City solicitor.
The ordinances bill of 1606 and the London estates bill of 1607 were notable examples of co-operation between the livery companies, but they were far from unique. In 1604 the Blacksmiths and the Girdlers jointly presented a bill to Parliament, which failed to gain a first reading.
Co-operation between the livery companies was less common, however, than conflict. Many companies had overlapping economic interests, and regarded legislation as a useful means of improving their position at the expense of their rivals or those in associated trades. For example, in 1593 and 1604 the Coopers preferred legislation to force individual Brewers to limit the number of coopers they retained.
Companies with overlapping interests were often reluctant to consult each other before introducing legislation, with predictable results. In 1607 the Carpenters preferred a bill for the proper measuring and marking of timber. After a first reading in the Commons on 10 Mar., the bill encountered opposition from the Shipwrights. The Carpenters responded by belatedly conferring with the Shipwrights, paying them for copies of their objections and bestowing 20s. upon their clerk. Despite these conciliatory gestures, the bill was rejected at its second reading in May.
While some companies were at odds with each other, others were at war with themselves, and these internecine conflicts sometimes spilled over into Parliament. In 1624 the Goldsmiths presented a bill to the Lords to force its members to reoccupy the shops along Cheapside and Lombard Street, many of which were closed or occupied by ‘mean traders’. However, those Company members who lived outside London were unwilling to move their premises, and in April more than 100 of them descended upon the Lords’ committee for the bill ‘in a tumultuous fashion’ to protest. Their noisy intervention effectively scuppered the bill.
Unlike the capital’s trading companies, none of London’s livery companies found their right to exist explicitly questioned by Parliament before the early 1620s, with the possible exception of the Pinmakers in 1606.
The agitation against monopolies, which resulted in attacks on two of the livery companies, also blighted attempts by several companies to pass legislation. In March 1621 a bill to confirm the Gardeners’ Company was rejected after a first reading ‘without one negative’, and the Company’s patent was called in to be examined.
The volume of legislation laid before Parliament by London’s companies and hospitals is difficult to gauge accurately because of gaps in the records, but it is clear that between them they were responsible for generating more bills than the Corporation. During the 1604 session the Corporation promoted seven or eight bills at most, whereas London’s other lobby groups introduced at least ten: the Blacksmiths, Brewers, Clothworkers, Coopers, Painters, Skinners and Watermen all introduced bills;
After 1604 the companies’ initial burst of legislative enthusiasm began to subside. Nevertheless, in 1605/6 the Great Twelve jointly sought to confirm their ordinances, and measures were also preferred by the Brewers, Clothworkers, Plaisterers, Pinmakers and Skinners, though the Brewers’ seems never to have been read.
Only one of the London companies preferred legislation to the winter session of 1610. This was the Fishmongers, who agreed to pay the charges of a bill to repeal an Act against barrelled fish.
Like the Corporation, none of the London companies preferred legislation to the 1625 Parliament, presumably because of the plague epidemic. However, when Parliament reconvened in 1626 very few companies submitted bills, even though Parliament sat for more than four months and the threat of plague had lifted. The New River Company and Apothecaries offered one each, and London’s clothworkers and dyers were probably behind a measure to relieve those in their trades who were suffering as a result of the Spanish war and the trade depression, but that was all. By 1628 the picture had worsened. None of the livery companies submitted legislation in 1628, and in 1629 only the Brewers contemplated doing so.
The sharp decline in Company legislation in the 1620s broadly mirrors the Corporation’s abandonment of its customary legislative programme. In both cases, the main reason for the decline undoubtedly lay in falling success rates. Seven of the 29 or so Company measures laid before the first Jacobean Parliament were enacted, these being the Watermen’s (1604), Painters’ (1604), Skinners’ (1606), Leathersellers’ (1607), Salters’ and Brewers’ (1610), Horners’ (1610), and London estates’ bills (1607). However, the Parliaments of 1614 and 1621 were entirely sterile, enacting no private legislation at all. At first several companies regarded this as an aberration, and in 1624 eight of them preferred legislation. However, they soon discovered their mistake, as only the Cheesemongers saw their bill pass into law. Thereafter only a handful of companies were prepared to finance legislation that had little or no chance of success. The persistence of the Charterhouse Hospital was almost certainly down to the fact that its parliamentary costs were funded, not from its own limited resources, but from the personal estate of its late founder, Thomas Sutton, who had died the wealthiest commoner in England.
Another factor which helps to explain the decline in volume of Company legislation was the development of an alternative method of bringing business to Parliament’s attention. In 1621 many companies chose to petition the Commons rather than prefer bills, especially when their intention was to seek redress of their grievances rather than extend their authority. Petitioning the Commons was not entirely new, of course, but the emergence of the committee of the whole House, which dealt exclusively in non-legislative business, resulted in a vast increase in petitioning. One of the main advantages of proceeding by petition was that it obviated the need to pay fees in the Lords, thereby reducing the cost of parliamentary lobbying. Petitioning was also regarded as an attractive option because there was a good chance that any grievances taken to the Commons would be presented to the king, whereas a bill had to succeed for it to have any effect.
The plague outbreak of 1625 meant that none of the London companies petitioned the Commons that year, although a petition from the London merchants trading to France was warmly entertained.
Petitioning helps to explain the reduction in the volume of legislation preferred by London companies during the 1620s. Even so, the number of petitions was smaller than the shortfall in bills. Indeed, the overall volume of Company business before the parliaments of the later 1620s was markedly less than it had been at the beginning of James’s reign. When the Corporation’s abandonment of its legislative programme is also taken into account, it is clear that the 1620s witnessed a general collapse in the volume of London’s parliamentary business. This was ironic, for the 1620s were a time when fears for the survival of Parliament were widespread. At the very moment when many Englishmen were desperate to preserve the nation’s representative body, London’s institutions evidently lost confidence in Parliament, and in particular its role as a legislative assembly.
in the freemen
Number of voters: c. 2500